Esse arts + opinions is a bilingual contemporary art magazine publishing primarily critical analyses and essays on current artistic practices. Submissions for the thematic section (1,500 to 2,000 words) must be sent in DOCX or RTF format to redaction@esse.ca by September 1, 2026. Please include a short biographical notice (35 words) as well as your e-mail and mailing address. Persons wishing to first submit a note of intent (250-500 words) are invited to do so before June 1, 2026. No notes of intent will be read after this date, but it is still possible to submit a final text by the issue deadline (September 1, 2026).

Please consult the editorial policy and the writing protocol before submitting your text.

What I call the night differs from the darkness of thought; the night has the violence of light. The night is in itself the youth and the rapture of thought.
– Georges Bataille 

The dialectic between darkness and light spans the history of Western modern art, especially since Caravaggio used chiaroscuro to make areas of shadow the basic condition for luminist expression and the full chromatic materiality of painting. Contemporary artists have seized upon this idea to articulate the occult zones of the unconscious. Shadow, the very foundation of representation and form according to certain legends about the origins of painting, is exploited today specifically as a raw material and as a positive and active element in numerous installations, projections, and even sculptures. These practices, largely inspired by Chinese shadow theatre and shadowgraphy, eschew the binary light–darkness dialectic and obscure the boundaries of the art field, manifesting the capacity of shadow to explore margins and marginalities and to reveal the political potential of a poetics of oneirism.

Breaking with the oculocentrism that is the basis for a hegemonic culture in which seeing is the prerequisite for knowledge, darkness has been explored as a means of bursting through or out of the white-cube apparatus that the art critic Brian O’Doherty described as loaded, non-neutral, and cultural. For instance, current museological practices employ darkness to critique the museum as an institution, and some scenographic experiments use it to delineate an altered vision, reminding us that darkness and night—the very theatres of introspection—are properties threatened by the capitalist colonization of time, as the essayist Jonathan Crary noted, as well as by light pollution. For some, this struggle for darkness resonates with the poet Edouard Glissant’s theory of thought founded on the paradigm of opacity; far from obscurity, Glissant offers a salutary alternative to the notion of thought as transparent, which has historically had the consequence of distancing and objectifying—and ultimately dominating—through the act of “understanding.”

This yearning for transparent reason is what guided the emergence from the obscurantist shadows illuminated by the European Enlightenment. Foundational to modernity and the development of “liberal” democracies, Enlightenment philosophy, intended to be universal, was largely built on a theorization of exclusive alterity, even as the racialist categories of whiteness and blackness were being conceived (and reflected in the debates about colour in painting at the time). Indeed, the philosopher Charles W. Mills demonstrated that Western societies’ basic social contract is in fact a racial contract. By creating norms, centres, and canons, with their concomitant margins, peripheries, and art hierarchies, hegemonic power obscured—and obscures—certain bodies and certain lives. (Contemporary) art, as a phenomenon of the visible, is presented as an effective solution by bringing these concealed life experiences and parallel realities into view. This is because, far from the permanent spectacularization of our (partial) reality, for which the omnipresent blue glow of our interfaces become the alienating vehicle, darkness holds many realities, worlds, edges, images, aspirations, escapes, and more. Everything is already there: we must return to the long-overlooked shadows and darkness—as numerous mythologies have proposed, and as many non-Western epistemologies are already doing.

For this issue, Esse arts + opinions is looking for authors to explore the critical, political, theoretical, and poetic potential of darkness in contemporary art. We welcome propositions that discuss darkness as an optical element of the visual conditions to which blackness, shadow, or night are attached, and that explore its more figurative dimension, to which the notion of the unconscious or any other “shadow zone” of knowledge could be linked. How do contemporary art practices and non-Western or decolonial epistemologies offer an opening to what is beyond the darkness/light binarity and ultimately reimagine darkness as a space of opacity, resistance, or empowerment? What resolution to (post)modernity does darkness in art allow us to imagine? How does art participate in cross-fertilizing the oneiric and the political?

Consult the editorial policy and the writing protocol.